Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination by Alondra Nelson has been chosen as a co-winner of the ASA Race, Gender and Class Section's 2012 Distinguished Book Award. The award will be presented at the Race, Gender, and Class reception at the American Sociological Association meeting in Denver, CO, on Aug. 17th, 2012.

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Alondra Nelson recovers a lesser-known aspect of The Black Panther Party’s broader struggle for social justice: health care. Nelson argues that the Party’s focus on health care was practical and ideological and that their understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race.